Tag Archives: evolutionary ideal

Just now world leaders are telling us it’s time to close our borders and load our guns. With all the loonies and radicalized nut-jobs out there, we need to make security our highest priority. Inside our own nation, subgroups are putting tribal loyalty above the common good, as political parties, religious sects, and social classes antagonize each other. The media keep streaming to our screens images and stories of police brutality, hate crimes, and seemingly random massacres, promoting the view that everything is falling apart.

Other voices such as Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress), Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow), and Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think) are trying to help us out of this fixation on the negative by presenting actual data as evidence of the fact that not only is everything not falling apart, but some very important things are coming together for a brighter picture.

Far fewer people today die from famines, epidemics, or human violence than at any time in history. Breakthroughs in science and technology, while they probably won’t save the world, are making it possible for more people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives. Climate change notwithstanding, most of the major concerns on our global horizon are solvable as long as we can work together for the good of all.

And yet, getting along and working together is where we often run into trouble. If we could work together for the greater good, perhaps nothing would be impossible. But certain people are intent on throwing wrenches in the gears – poking our insecurities and curating our worst fears by distorting facts, spinning stories, and making up shit to make us believe that things are really, really bad.

A few of these crazymakers are just plain crazy, while most of them do it because they stand to benefit from our emotional reactions and irrational behavior. What will they get out of it? Power, control, financial profit, real estate holdings, fifteen minutes on TV or forever in heaven. Who knows? Their challenge in any case is getting us to believe things that aren’t really true.

When the stress of daily life has us reeling off center and out of our depths, we are vulnerable to negative thinking. We are just where they want us.

Rather than closing our eyes to the very real troubles around us or falling for the doomsday scenarios of emotional terrorists (including many politicians, preachers, and self-styled prophets), I propose that we momentarily detach our focus from this or that symptom and open our frame to a much (very much!) wider horizon. Oftentimes the upheavals we experience in life cannot be understood by analyzing only the local conditions and direct causal connections among things.

Indeed, the most important factors are systemic ones – broader dynamics, delayed effects, and feedback loops that cycle over many months, years, and even (as I’ll suggest) evolutionary eras.

Our ability to take in the bigger picture and longer view on things is compromised by the sense of urgency whipped up by those emotional terrorists mentioned earlier. With the right rhetoric and charismatic flair they can incite us to act without any concern over the larger and later consequences of our action.

This is when it’s critical that we each find our center, close our eyes, take a few deep breaths, and then open our eyes again to what might really be going on.

My diagram presents a scheme of the biggest of big pictures and longest of long views. The structure of our universe has been evolving for nearly 14 billion years: starting in a quantum flaring-forth (the so-called “big bang”), condensing into matter, stirring to life, waking as mind, and bending reflexively upon itself in the self-conscious ego.

And here we are, the universe contemplating itself. In our ego conceit we might believe that self-consciousness is the endgame, the ultimate aim of the whole shebang.

But not so.

A self-conscious personality is instead a penultimate phenomenon in the evolution of our universe, and like most things which are transitions or progression thresholds to something else (or something more), it is inherently unstable. The human personality needs to connect with other personalities in order to maintain a balance between its subjective needs and the social environment. An individual ego emerges out of this reciprocal exchange with other egos, and it continues to lean on others in the construction of identity.

Because every ego wrestles to some extent with insecurity over our subjective need to feel safe, loved, capable, and worthy (for more on the feeling-needs see A New Hierarchy of Needs), we can lean into relationships with unrealistic expectations, which inevitably leads to disappointment, resentment, and distrust. It’s this emotional insecurity that gets exploited by those with ulterior motives.

In truth, emotional terrorists are themselves deeply insecure and are compensating for their unmet needs to feel safe, loved, capable, or worthy by manipulating us and others around them.

The big picture suggests, then, that our current global situation is on the brink of evolutionary change – literally a transformation in our very nature as human beings. For the past several millenniums we have been oriented in reality by the separate center of personal identity known as ego (my “I” and your “I”).

As new technologies in transportation, communication, and production have been steadily shrinking the distances between us, the elevated stress of this congested environment on our developing identities has made us more anxious, reactive, and increasingly aggressive with each other. We might say that while the infrastructure for supporting the next leap in our human transformation has been coming together over the centuries of progress, our neurotic insecurities and convictions keep holding us back and pulling us down.

Beyond the self-conscious ego lies a further frontier of our communal spirit – that is to say, of the inner aim in our nature to connect in creative partnerships and empathic communities. Throughout the Egoic Era this higher ideal of human nature has been represented in the virtues of deities who are exalted in worship and imitated in the moral aspirations of devotees.

In my diagram I have placed this “evolutionary ideal” inside a thought bubble, referencing the various ways it has been imagined and represented in art, myth, and theology. By definition, the ideal doesn’t have objective existence. The gods are not literal beings, but literary figures exemplifying the waking virtues of our higher self.

Our ability to make the leap where we begin to internalize and live out what we had earlier only imagined and worshiped in the ideal is dependent on our willingness to let go of beliefs, of the attachments that anchor them, and of the insecurities inside our personality that keep us so self-involved.

Dropping away from ego (illustrated in my downward arrow) we enter the grounding mystery of our existence – also named our “existential ground” or ground of being. With each descending level awareness opens to a larger horizon: from “just me” and other egos, to that of all sentient minds, to the still larger web of life and its physical foundations, and out to the ultimate horizon of the universe itself where all is one.

Coming back up from these mystical depths to our personal identity, we arrive with the realization that we are what the universe is presently doing, and that our next step is one of moving outward in self-transcendence for the sake of joining with others in celebration of our One Life together.

Life in community isn’t always easy, and conflicts will arise from time to time. But with the shared vision of its New Reality before us, we can take at least three steps forward.

A common mistake in diagnosing our current predicament is to blame religion, when it’s not religion itself but a particular corrupt type of religion that’s blocking the path to our better selves. Once the focus shifts to theism as the type in question, a second mistake fails to distinguish between corrupt and healthy forms of theism, recommending that we simply push them all into oblivion. Wouldn’t we be better off without religion? What’s wrong with rejecting god once and for all, along with spirituality and everything sacred?

My returning reader knows me as a proponent of post-theism, which is different from atheism on several counts. First, it holds that the major question with respect to god is not about existence but rather his function in the longer project of human fulfillment – even of human salvation, if we understand the term in light of its etymology as “coming into wholeness.”

Secondly, post-theism regards religion (from the Latin religare) as a system of stories, symbols, values and practices that “link” us to the grounding mystery within, to one another in community, and all of us together to the great turning mystery of our universe. In fact, reading those crucial linkages in reverse – first to the cosmos (nature), next to others (tribe), and finally to our own inner ground of being – charts out the sequence of stages in the historical development of religion itself: from body-centered animism, through ego-centered theism, and finally into a soul-centered post-theism.

Religion needs to transform throughout this process, but even if it gets stuck at times (as theism has been stuck for a while now) its connecting function is something we humans cannot do without. You may not be formally affiliated with an institutional religion, but you are nevertheless working out connections that support the centered meaning of your life – and that is your religion.

Lastly, in its deep appreciation of the functional roles of god and religion in the spiritual evolution of our species, post-theism differs from most forms of atheism by insisting on the necessary ongoing contribution of theism. Even after it has successfully awakened the individual to his or her own creative authority, and the virtues once attributed to the deity are now actualized in the individual’s own life-expression, it’s not as if theism can be simply abandoned and left in our past. There will always be more individuals coming behind us whose progressive liberation needs the support that only theism can provide.

So that I can move the discussion out of the realm of official world religions and refresh in our minds the critical importance of theism in human development more generically, my diagram above illustrates the correlation between tribal religion and the original theistic system of the family unit. Freud was correct in seeing tribal religion as a societal model based in and projected outwardly from our early experiences of Mother, Father, and the sibling circle.

Of course, nearly two thousand years earlier, Jesus (among other teachers) had conceived this correlation in his metaphor of god as “our heavenly father” and of our neighbors (including enemies!) as brothers and sisters of the same human family.

It’s not a heresy, then, to acknowledge the equivalencies between the divine higher power of a tribal deity and the parental taller powers that shaped our earliest experience. Historically, depending on whether the principal deity was regarded as a (celestial) father or a (terrestrial) mother, the social system of his or her devotees tended to reflect that hierarchy of values – higher-to-lower (ordained) in patriarchal societies, or inner-to-outer (organic) in partnership societies. Societies (such as our own) that have been significantly shaped by the Judeo-Christian or biblical-patriarchal worldview tend to favor an ordained top-down hierarchy, which predisposed us for the longest time to assume that earthly realities are copies or reflections of heavenly ones, when the line of influence actually runs in the opposite direction.

In other words, literal mothers and fathers have served since the beginning as archetypal origins of our various (literary or mythological) representations of god. This makes a human family the primordial theistic system, and every one of us a theist (at least starting out) in this more generic sense. With this correlation in mind, we can easily see how our developmental progress as individuals through the family system has its reflection in the cultural career of theism. We should expect to see some of the common dysfunctions in family dynamics showing up (i.e., projected upward) in the character of theism at the societal level.

Referring to my diagram, let’s first notice how a parent’s role needs to progress according to the emerging center of personal identity in the child. We begin on the left in a state of ‘infantile dependency’, with our newborn experience entirely immersed in the animal urgencies of our body. In this condition of helpless vulnerability, we need before anything else to be protected, cuddled, and nourished by our parent (typically our mother). Her role at this point is to provide for our needs, to give us what our body requires to be calm, satisfied, and secure. In theism proper, this maternal providence is projected upward as the graceof god – freely and presciently giving a devotee what is needed. Give us this day our daily bread.

If our parent is sufficiently attentive to our needs and provident in her care for us, we are enabled to feel attuned with her reassuring presence. This deep attunement is what Erik Erikson called “basic trust,” and it will serve as the foundation for all developmental achievements to come. In religion, such a grounding trust in god’s providence is known as ‘faith’ – not believing thus-and-so about the deity, but entrusting one’s existence to the present support of divine grace.

The progression from infancy into early childhood introduces a new challenge, in learning how to behave ourselves in polite company. Our parental taller powers serve this development in us by clarifying and reinforcing the rules for social behavior. In addition to continuing in their providential role – but gradually pulling back so we can start doing some things for ourselves – they focus on prescribing for us the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, defining what it means to be a ‘good boy’ or ‘nice girl’. This prescriptive role of our parental taller powers is what gets projected upward as the theistic notion of god’s will. Teach us thy ways, O Lord, and show us the right path.

On our side, we need to obey these prescriptions, these rules of acceptable behavior. A rule system built on the binary codes of right and wrong (with no grey between) is properly called an obedience morality, and all of us need to find our way through it. Some family systems are permissive, which can lead to insufficient clarity and motivation for pro-social behavior, producing moral complacency. Other family systems are repressive, where a child is punished and threatened for acting on his impulses or when she comes close to crossing the line.

Repressive systems are responsible for the rejected and disowned aspects of personality that Carl Jung named the shadow: the part of myself that is unacceptable, censured, or condemned. To fit in and belong we find it necessary to keep all these things in the dark, behind us and down in the cellar of our personality. In my diagram, parental rules (and god’s will as their correlate in tribal religion) which are authoritarian (Because I said so!) and repressive (Don’t you even think about it!) drive down a shadow of insecurity, shame, bigotry, and hostility.

This is the pathology of a dysfunctional theism which is evident all around the planet today, where true believers unleash their own inner demons on their enemies and the world around them. Ironically their moral convictions drive them in destructive ways.

Let’s come back to the healthy family system – for they do exist! As we make our way through childhood, our moral development necessitates a shift from merely obeying (or breaking) rules, to orienting our focus on exemplars of positive virtue. Our parents need to portray for us such virtuous attitudes and behaviors so that we can know how to embody them and live them out. Their demonstrated virtue awakens in us an aspiration to be like them, opening our path to adult responsibility.

Our mythological depictions of god are not only a projection of what’s going on in the theistic family system. The literary figure of deity also serves as a guiding ideal for an entire tribe or culture. We know that not all families are healthy, and no parents are perfect. But just as the general trend in living things is toward their mature and fully actualized selves, so the trend in theism over its long history has been into literary depictions of god that more clearly exemplify the virtues of human fulfillment. Be merciful [or in another version, perfect] as your father in heaven is merciful [or perfect].

We can see this progression even in the relatively brief (1,200 years or so) history of biblical writings, where Yahweh becomes increasingly temperate, merciful, and benevolent in his manner of relating to human beings. (The occasional paroxysms of wrath and vengeance are momentary exceptions to this longer trend in the developing character of god in the Bible, and are more reflective of the distress and insecurity of individual authors and local communities than anything else.)

In The Progress of Wisdom I suggested a way in which we can view several deep spiritual traditions (present-day world religions) as exhibiting our transcultural progress toward a clarified understanding of human fulfillment. The diagram above identifies these stages of awakening to wisdom in the box at the upper-right. Each stage in this broad-scale transformation was preceded slightly by a change in the way god (or ultimate reality) was depicted in the myths, theology, and art of the time.

Covenant fidelity (Judaism) re-imagined deity as less elusive and unpredictable, but instead as committed to the human future by a clear set of promises and fiduciary agreements. A little later in India (Buddhism) an insight into the liberating power of universal compassion took hold. Later still, but continuing with this evolving ideal, Jesus proclaimed his gospel of unconditional forgiveness (love even for the enemy: a message that orthodox Christianity failed to institutionalize). And finally, absolute devotion (Islam) brought this progressive curriculum of spiritual wisdom to a culmination with its ideal of uncompromising commitment to a life of fidelity, compassion, and forgiveness.

To appreciate this as a transcultural curriculum of spiritual wisdom, it’s essential that we see each advancing step in context of the larger developing picture. To split one virtue off from the rest only distorts and perverts it, as when Islamic extremists split absolute devotion from the fuller curriculum and proceed to engage terrorism against outsiders and infidels. Or else, as in the case of Christianity where Jesus’ radical virtue of unconditional forgiveness lies buried beneath an orthodox doctrine of salvation through redemptive violence, it gets sentimentalized and effectively forgotten.

The general point is that as these higher virtues began to awaken in a few individuals, they were added to our mythological depictions of god (or ultimate reality), which then functioned for the entire community as an exemplary model of an authentic and fulfilled humanity. In its worship of the deity, a community intentionally elevates and glorifies the praiseworthy attributes of god, as they recommit themselves to being more like him in their daily lives. In becoming more godlike they are actually becoming more fully human.

Obviously we haven’t been great at getting the message and realizing our true potential as a species. The complications and setbacks that affect every theistic system – the neglect and abuse, the moral repression and shadow pathology mentioned earlier – have arrested our progress again and again. But whereas some go on to advocate for the discrediting of religion and god in the interest of our human maturity, a brighter future, and peace on earth, as a proponent of post-theism I have tried to show that the way to these goals runs through theism (tribal and/or family systems) – and furthermore, that we can’t get there without it.

Our present task, then, is to use our creative authority in the understanding that we are myth-makers who create (and can re-create) worlds. We can elevate an ideal of our evolving nature that calls out our better selves, connects us charitably to one another, and (re-)orients us in the One Life we all share. We need to take responsibility for a theism that will promote homo sapiens sapiens – the truly wise and generous beings we want to be.

A vibrant spirituality after god (post-theos) requires that we go through god. Religion really isn’t the problem.

Morality (from the Latin mos, custom): Folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group.

Ethics (from the Greek ethos, custom): The body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group.

My description of the ethical function of religion has prompted a few of my readers to request a more careful definition of what I mean by the term “ethical,” and how (or whether) it differs from another word, “moral,” that is commonly used in this regard. Before I answer this question, I’d like to put the ethical function of religion back into context where it serves as the fulfillment-in-behavior of an experience that begins in the (sometimes shocking) awareness of the grounding mystery in which All is One (i.e., the mystical function).It’s helpful to consider the system of religion’s four functions on the analogy of a tree. The mystical function corresponds to the tree’s roots reaching deep into the silent ground, while the ethical function is symbolized in the fruit, which is where the mystical nourishment from down within finds productive expression and fulfillment. As I see it, this flow from mystical experience to ethical behavior is not direct, but is rather mediated through the other two functions of religion.

The articulate structure of the tree’s trunk and branches represents the doctrinal function, which is where the spontaneous realization of oneness is converted into meaning. (Don’t we still talk about the various “branches” of knowledge?) Ultimately, the behavioral product (or produce) of ethical conduct calls on the support of inquiry, judgment, reasons, and justifications – in other words, it depends on a context of meaning. We don’t just “automatically” do the right thing; ethics is about intentional behavior that involves a reasonably articulate understanding of what really (and ultimately) matters in a given situation.

In my illustration above, the leaves of the tree are opened out to the light of the sun from whence they draw the energy necessary for photosynthesis. Both the sun and the outreaching leaves symbolize the devotional function of religion – the sun as a representation of the deity, and the sunward orientation of the leaves representing the aspiration of devotees. In religion the deity isn’t only “above” the community as the object of its worship; he or she is also “ahead” of the community as its aspirational ideal, depicting the higher virtues (compassion, kindness, fidelity, forgiveness, etc.) into which human nature is evolving. As they elevate a merciful god in their worship, the community is really glorifying the virtue of mercy itself as an ideal worthy of worship …

… and worthy of ethical pursuit. This is where in theism the devotional and ethical functions connect. And whereas in theism proper this connection operates under the radar of explicit awareness, in post-theism the literary character of the deity is appreciated as a construct of the mythic imagination which has been evolving in an ego-transcending and humanitarian direction over its long career.

This distinction between behavior that is pre-reflective – “under the radar of explicit awareness” – and behavior that is guided by critical reflection is the most helpful way of distinguishing morality and ethics. As can be seen in the dictionary definitions above, both words trace back to the same basic idea (a “custom” or way of doing something), one deriving from Latin and the other from Greek.

As their meanings later merged and developed in common usage, morality and ethics became differentiated to where morality now refers to the “unquestioned” rules and value-judgments that group members live by, while ethics entails a higher level of philosophical reflection on the principles that (perhaps should) govern human behavior.

This difference corresponds exactly, I would argue, with the phases of “early” and “late” theism, where early theism enjoins right behavior “because god commands it and will punish you if you don’t” and late theism exhorts followers to “be merciful as your father in heaven is merciful” (Jesus in Luke 6:36). This is the shift from obedience to aspiration, which I have suggested is a leading indicator in the genuine progress of theism into post-theism (see “Stuck on God“).

We all know that Nietzsche was bitterly critical of what he called “morality,” urging his generation towards the ideal of his “Overman” or ethical superman who throws off the chains of unquestioned moral customs – especially if these are placed beyond question by ecclesiastic orthodoxy – in order to take up their own lives in world-affirming passion. He didn’t believe that taking away the moral prescriptions of childhood would leave grownups without ethical purpose or direction. In this respect Nietzsche sounds a lot like the apostle Paul:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Our continuing challenge, as I see it, is to urge adults to grow up and not stay in that comfortable groove where because I said so – the “I” here being the parent, the police, or the patron deity – is the motive force behind our actions. True enough, actual children need this supervisory incentive for pro-social behavior, as their brains and social worldview are still in the process of opening up beyond the limited range of self-interest.

What we need are adult caregivers and educators who have advanced sufficiently into their own self-actualization and expanded horizons-of-life to support and encourage youngsters into maturity with “reasonable urgency.” We can still speak to them of provident reality in personal terms, as god’s benevolent care for all creatures, even as god’s loving concern for each of us. But at some point, the adolescent needs to be invited to take up his or her creative authority and become a self-responsible benefactor of the greater good, to embrace life on the other side of god (post theos).

So we progress, however slowly and by fits and starts, from morality to ethics.

Look out into the galaxies, into a seemingly infinite darkness splashed and speckled with nebulae and stars beyond number. Cosmologists estimate that our universe is somewhere between 12 and 15 billion years old, born from an energy burst in which the primary structures of matter were forged and then flung, stretching the horizon of space-time as it expanded. I read recently that if you were to take two straight pins, hold them out at arms length and cross them together, the point of their intersection would conceal as many as 1,500 galaxies, each galaxy home to many billions of stars, and many of these stars suns to their own planets.

Where are you in this cosmic context? Such speculation can make you feel insignificant, until you realize that all of this has somehow worked together, over all those eons and across all that distance, to be aware of itself in you. Scientists investigate the conditions that must have obtained for life first to emerge on our planet. What were the chances that the oxygen excreted as waste by primordial single-celled organisms would eventually inflate an atmospheric dome where aerobic symbians and the teeming populations of animal life would flourish? Not very great. In fact, given the narrow margins and multiple variables that make Earth hospitable to life, your existence is something of a fluke.

If you were to take a mystical slant on this mystery rather than a scientific one, you might be able to look down into yourself, deep into your biology, through helical strands of organic chemistry and beneath the table of elements, poke your head through the space-time fabric of energy strings and quantum fields, and eventually come to an astonished realization that this present mystery of reality is provident. Whatever it is (and there really is no saying), this mystery is the very ground of your being, the life-spring and gracious support of all that you are.

It is a popular mistake to think of the soul as a metaphysical resident riding patiently inside the mortal vehicle of the body – popular not only in being widespread across the religions, but also because it provides reassurance to the neurotic ego (impostor of the soul) that it will not die but live forever. For lack of empirical evidence, science has generally dismissed this notion of the soul as a carryover of superstition or a projection of wishful thinking. And so it should, not in order to pursue its “atheistic agenda” but rather because this popular belief is neither scientifically substantiated nor spiritually respectable.

What we call “body” and “soul” are nothing more (or less!) than the outward and inward orientations of awareness. Your body isn’t just a piece of meat, and your soul isn’t who you really are. Who you are is your ego – this socially constructed center of identity that puts on and takes off the variety of roles your tribe has programmed you to play (though you quickly forgot you were pretending to “be someone”). This skill in wardrobe change is likely what encouraged the view of the body as merely another disguise, the final costume to be dropped at the end of this earthly life.

Your body – just listen to how this comes off sounding like a possession of some sort! – is your place in the sensory-physical marvel of our universe. Looking up into the night sky, it is the complex aperture of your living eye that takes in the faint twinkling lights from across the black vault of outer space. An optic nerve carries these impulses to the visual centers in your brain where they are transmitted along networks of nerve cells, propagated through ion-charged channels, and float as chemical messages across 100 billion twinkling lights of inner space.

The material substance of your body derives as stardust from that primeval energy burst some 14 billion years ago. Your genetic line traces deep into the evolution of life, down through its very recent human expression and back into the trees, to the amphibian marsh, and out into the sparkling sea where an auspicious arrangement of organic chemistry first began to capture sunlight and store it away. Primordial sea salt still runs in your blood and conducts electricity through your cells.

Your soul isn’t just along for the ride. It is where consciousness breaks past the attachments and defenses of ego, descends through longer and more relaxed frequencies of awareness, until it dissolves entirely into the provident support of its own ground. We could call it your essential self (from esse, being), but only if we were careful not to separate it from the living organism of your body. The body and its realm (the sensory-physical universe) is properly regarded as trans-personal, beyond (and around) the ego-centered personality, while the soul and its realm (the intuitive-mystical ground) is entero-personal, within (and beneath).

Science and spirituality are thus two ways we touch the present mystery of reality, outwardly and inwardly. Neither mode of experience is terribly interested in what it means. Meaning comes later; or more precisely, it is subsequently constructed as we try to make sense of our experience. In the spontaneous moment of engagement with reality, we are typically transfixed in wonder, not thinking about it but somehow aware of it all at once. As we stand under the starry canopy or surrender deeply to being, our wonder turns into a quest for our place in it.

Our quest for meaning is articulated in questions, about who we are, how it began, where it’s going, and (perhaps most urgent of all) why we are here. These questions are invitations to answers – meditations, stories, and theories that bend the outgoing line of inquiry back like a boomerang to the contemplative mind. Answers give us the orientation we seek, serving to validate our questions and provide conclusions we can use to build out the larger meaning of our life.

Once a conclusion has been reached, the original urgency of our questions as well as the inspiration of our quest effectively come to an end. As the word suggests, a conclusion is a closure, a period to silence the question mark. Once a conclusion is settled on, our mind uses it as foundation and scaffolding to higher-order questions – and so on we go.

If we were paying attention we’d take into account the various ways that the present mystery of reality – the way things really are – spills over the rim of our neat conclusions. Since meaning is a mental construct and not a property of reality itself, a wider and deeper exposure to life requires stronger commitment to our conclusions, a degree of emotional investment in their truth that can hold them in place despite serious erosion of their credibility. A conclusion that persists only (or mostly) because we need it to be true is called a belief.

Both science and spirituality are committed to investigative methods that subject belief to the scrutiny of actual experience, whether by means of controlled experiments or meditative disciplines. In that zone between, however, where the tribe, its deity, and the socially conditioned ego conspire to promote and defend our beliefs, meaning becomes fairly quickly outdated. The lack of experiential support and this rapid recession of relevance then call for more commitment to keep everything in place, until we reach the point where our emotional dependency on things being just this way makes us forget that we have been pretending all along.

Over time – years and decades for the individual, generations and centuries for the tribe – beliefs slip out of sight and gradually become the unconscious assumptions of our worldview. Instead of the fresh answers to questions they once were or the emotional investments they later became, these assumptions are now carried along (from sumere, to take up) as the mental filter that screens out not only contradictions and discrepancies to what we believe, but the present mystery of reality itself.

When religion lost its roots in mystical experience and the spiritual reflex of wonder, its ostensible purpose was altered, from waking human nature to the grandeur of existence and our evolutionary ideal as a species, to perpetuating former revelations and keeping believers comfortably asleep. What probably started as a celebration of existence and communal participation in the cycle of life and death eventually became a bastion of security and a program for getting out alive. Today its deepest assumptions are grossly incompatible with the present discoveries of science and spirituality, and its convictions – where emotional commitment to belief is so extreme as to make the mind a prisoner (convict) to its own absurdites – are pushing us to the brink of self-destruction.

Religion is an answer to the problem or dilemma that besets our human condition. Throughout its long history, the answer of religion has changed according to the nature of its problem.

Earliest religion was focused on the body and a need for the business of society to stay connected to the provident rhythms of nature. It was ceremonial, meticulously ritualized, and dedicated to synchronizing cultural activity with the urgencies, cycles and seasons of life. In its elaborate productions culture spends the energy that nature provides, requiring regular refreshment to continue.

The dilemma or problem, then, had to do with the fact that culture is not a renewable resource. Despite its impressive production output, societies continue to depend on the life energy and raw materials of the planetary environment. Living off the land and taking the life of other animals for food made our earliest ancestors keenly aware of the need to respect this balance, cooperate with nature, and repay a portion by ritual offerings and sacrifices.

In time, the focus shifted to more socially unique concerns like security, membership, identity and purpose. Thus arose a religion of the ego. If life energy is drawn up from the animal nature of the body (and from the greater “mother nature” of our planet), then ego is where a large amount of this energy is expended. Pursuits of security and recognition, property and status, quickly exhaust themselves. They are not replenishing cycles but more like straight lines losing strength and trailing off in the hopeful pursuit of “enough.”

As the personality is chronically stressed by discontentment, eventually the ego fastened on a marvelous fantasy – that one day a clean escape would be made, leaving behind the mortal burden of the body and accomplishing at last a perfect state of everlasting security. What we can call “ego religion” is focused on artificial life, not natural life; on a life that is unnaturally extended along a straight line that never ends. Its fantasy is of a disembodied and entirely metaphysical existence, reunited with a “heavenly father” after a painful and frustrating sojourn with “mother nature.”

Ego religion tends to be denominational (heavily invested in the tribe and its tradition), proselytic (focused on conversion and recruiting members), moralistic (enforcing rules on how one should live), and gnostic (upholding and defending certain doctrines as necessary to salvation). As a program for resource management, social cohesion, and mind control it can’t be beat. While it demonstrates little sacred concern for nature and the body, vestiges of earlier (nature) religion persist in its holy days (holidays) coinciding with solstices, moon phases, and seasonal transitions.

What raises the concern of many today is not so much that ego religion is all those things just mentioned, but that it pushes an agenda of escape, disassociation from the body and nature, and departing to a better place. How long can it go on, where we use up the resources of one location and abandon it for the next? How much longer can we continue to generate stress – perhaps the one renewable resource of culture – and multiply the diseases of body and mind?

How long, really, can we live as “souls inside bodies,” waiting in patient hope or hastening the day when we shall be set free from this prison house and rewarded in heaven for being good and getting it right?

So that is the problem of our human condition today. The fall-out of this divided life of ours – suppressing, craving, consuming, wasting and leaving – makes coming back not only less and less appealing, but over time less and less possible. The irony is that, while religion might offer an answer to this problem, religion is itself a major cause of the problem. The vision of a scorched and lifeless landscape contained in some of its apocalyptic myths is slowly (but less slowly) becoming our self-fulfilling prophecy.

If religion is to offer an answer to the dilemma of our human condition, then it will be a call to return. Interestingly enough, this is the literal meaning of the familiar word “repent.” In this case, it’s a call to return to what we have been trying so hard to leave behind – the earth, nature, our bodies, and the burden of mortality.

This is what I am calling “soulful religion,” which is not a religion about immortality, metaphysics and the afterlife, but rather of incarnational living, creative community, human fulfillment and planetary well-being.

In fact, it seems to me that this has been The Way of Salvation from the very beginning. During the long winding diversion into metaphysics, escapism and redemptive violence, a few brave lights did emerge from time to time. They spoke of life HERE, love NOW, and of liberty beyond the confines of tribe, tradition and orthodoxy. It didn’t go well for many of them.

Ironically (again) the very crusaders who persecuted and stamped out these light-bringers later memorialized and venerated them in their churches. But not until the story could be rewritten and the savior remade into a drop-in rescuer, a god in disguise, or a scapegoat for sin. (Jesus was made into all three.) As Bible scholarship is able to do its business outside of denominational publishing houses and unmotivated by religious convictions, the emerging picture of the “historical Jesus” is looking less and less like the Savior of Christendom.

In a time when many are asking about truth in religion and the way of salvation, we need to consider this possibility. It’s not that one religion is true while the others are not; or that all religions are true in their own way; or that religion itself is nothing but superstition and lies.

Rather, the religions are like squiggly lines moving across history, each one a meandering path through the landscape and time zones of our collective human experience. Most of the time, a given religion is busy working out its metaphysics, redefining its membership, getting back to fundamentals, or accommodating itself to the larger culture.But once in a while, the squiggle takes a turn and comes very close to the invisible guideline of fulfillment, wholeness, well-being and genuine community – to the greater wisdom and higher ideal of our own human nature. The light goes on, fear drops away, love opens out, and peace settles in. For this brief moment, as it aligns itself to The Way, a religion can be said to be true.

And in the next moment, as this truth gets defined, professed, and defended as the “only way” to god or heaven or life everlasting, it just as quickly veers away and falls off course. In some eras of history – and maybe we’re in one now – it’s possible that all religions are squiggling off in the distance, while just a few individuals around this whole planet – and maybe you’re one of them – are waking up and stepping quietly on The Way.